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░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░CALIFORNIA DREAMIN'░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░Robert McKay░░
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dedicated to Mama Cass Elliot
The leaves on the trees were brown. It was fitting, for the
trees, growing out of squares in the sidewalk covered with metal
gratings, were stunted and deformed by the steady diet of noise and
smoke and graffiti. The cold sharp wind rattled the leaves as they
clung to their stalks. The leaves were already brown, but they
hadn't yet fallen.
The wind came with a thin, depressing whistle through the
buildings. Huddled in corners or behind flimsy shelters of
cardboard and newspaper, the few bums and defectives still out
shivered in their apathetic poverty. The sky pressed crouched
grayly overhead, not like a storm about to break, but rather as a
dull, heavy blanket of despair. It was winter in New York.
I was out of work, and nearly out of money, and looking at the
very real possibility of being out a place to live. There might be
jobs here, and the government might be working up a jobs program,
but nothing seemed to help me. I'd worn my clothes out of
presentability, and couldn't afford to replace them; consequently I
was forced to lower my sights and hunt for work where a suit worn to
an interview was a drawback rather than an advantage. The clothes,
threadbare as they were, didn't provide much protection against the
numbing wind that came down the street and scraped my cheeks and
forehead raw, and turned my limbs into stiff so many hunks much
wood.
I wasn't a native New Yorker. I was from what I, as a left-
hander, liked to refer to as the "left coast." I was born and raised
in California, but with the influx of people from elsewhere the
costs were so high and the jobs so scarce that I began to drift. I
worked my way from job to job, until by the time I reached Nebraska
I was a confirmed drifter. I crisscrossed the country, and finally
got across the Mississippi after 10 years of wandering around on the
western side. Once across, it seemed as if I'd burned a bridge
behind me; it was natural now to deliberately drift east. I wound
up in New York, where I settled, drifting now not from place to
place but from job to job. As it happened, I managed to work my way
up, until I was no longer a day laborer or a messenger, but a minor
executive who had an office and a computer terminal and wore suits
to work.
But I quit one job too many, and at the wrong time. There was
a recession on, and for every opening there were a hundred
applicants. When all an employer has to do to fill a position is
drop a hook into a starving mass of fish, he can afford to pick only
the very best. And that didn't describe me. I was competent, and
had always done my best at whatever job I'd held, but I'm no expert
at anything. Most drifters aren't; they do too many different jobs
to be truly expert at any one thing. We're generalists, not
specialists.
So now I was walking down the street, deliberately walking over
the subway gratings to get a touch of warm air if possible. I had
no gloves, and my hands, stuck in my armpits, were still red and
stiff and subject to pain when accidentally bumped. I'd just come
from the last stop of the day - a construction site where the
superintendent had said that when they needed someone with a license
to drive a wheelbarrow, he'd call me. He thought it was funny.
Back in California it wouldn't be this cold. Oh, yeah, they
have winter out there. It gets down to 60 sometimes. It rains,
sure, and up in the mountains it may snow. I've seen Mt. Baldy
white several times - when I could see that far through the smog.
But it's nothing like here in the east. It doesn't come ice and
snow in southern California, it doesn't blow knife blade winds down
from the north, it doesn't torment you with dreams of a warmer and
better place.
When I find a job, I'm going to stick with it until I can save
me some money. When I've got enough in the bank, I'll head for
California. and when I get there, where the Beach Boys and Ronald
Reagan and a lot of suntanned people live, I'll never leave. That's
a promise.
-end-
Copyright (c)1993 Robert McKay